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A Towering Figure

Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco one hundred years ago today.

Ansel Adams was privately tutored as a child, and his early ambition was to be a concert pianist. From 1914 to 1927, he studied music at the San Francisco Conservatoire. His father gave him a camera in 1916; his first career-shaping pictures were of Yosemite. He studied photography with Frank Dittman from 1916 to 1917 while still at the Conservatoire.

Soon after leaving the Conservatoire, Adams redirected his career towards photography. For thirty years, starting in 1930, he worked with the press as a commercial photographer. In 1937, he moved to the Yosemite Valley, California, and began the landscape photography that elevated him to the very top of his field. In San Francisco in 1932, Adams cofounded Group f64 with Willard Van Dyke, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Sonia Noskowiak, and Henry Swift.

In 1940, with Beaumont Newhall and David McAlpin he created the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art, and in 1946 Adams founded the photography department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Due to his technical achievements with the camera, he became an advisor to the Polaroid Corporation in 1949. In 1962 he left Yosemite for Carmel, California, which became his permanent home.

In 1970 Adams helped create the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona at Tucson. Adams died in Monterey, California, in 1984.

Source: National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996).

Pictured: Ansel Adams, 1902–1984, North Dome, Basket Dome, Mount Hoffman, Yosemite, about 1935, silver print on paper, 6 1/2 x 8 5/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.